"What it all comes to is a confused and incoherent mixture of stories which are as old as the hills but are still unfinished"

Thursday, July 12, 2007

The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

Here's a blog that takes note of our society's need to wrap all kinds of words in quotation marks, particularly when making signs. Some people must have the idea that quotation marks are just another kind of underlining. Well, they're not! And you know what else -- it's not charming anymore either, so cut it out!

Thanks, Mr. Inertia, for the link.

You know, if I was walking down the street with a friend, I might point out some misused quotation marks, but chances are I'd be having a conversation with this friend and I wouldn't want to interrupt it. In regular life, misused quotation marks are just not that interesting. But on the internet, they're a perfectly legitimate subject for a blog and make for an absorbing three to fourteen minutes of reading. Television and newspapers ignore the small stuff (or anyway, purport to) and focus on the big and exciting and new stuff. But the bar for blogs is much lower -- lower, even, than the bar for casual conversation. There's a blog about the misuse of the word literally, one about dogs tied to things, and well of course I need not go on. All thanks to the cell phone camera and infinite bandwidth!